Ages
by Fading Grace
Summary: Hiei and Yukina, and the slow march into forever. Mentions of YukinaKuwabara, KuramaYukina, YukinaOthers. NOT HieiYukina.
1. 2056

2056

(Sixty-one years after YYH events.)

* * *

_Hiei: _

_It's been a long time. I had to search so very hard to find you, if this message even arrives before you move on. _

_I would welcome a visit. You don't need to be at the service, but perhaps we could talk. I would like that. _

_My address is just as it's always been, and I no more lock the windows now than ever. _

_Yukina _

* * *

She stood in the half-lit kitchen, all chrome and shiny stainless steel and smelling of lilies, bio-engineered to keep fresh and strong for a week after the funeral they adorned.

Her dress was black, despite the way cultural norms had shifted in the last sixty years. It was more common to wear white, to celebrate the man's life, but no one had faulted the widow for appearing somber and sad.

She stood in her kitchen and listened to her small kingdom, a matriarchy of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, being put down for bed.

The moon was rising. She'd seen the moon rise tens of thousands of times, but never so pale and empty.

And then something rustled and he was there, in a black suit that was currently in fashion but aesthetically horrid. It did nothing for his height or his hair, which he had defiantly kept in its natural straight-up style through the trends that more or less aligned with it and those that did not.

He looked no older than twenty-five, mature and steady and at ease in this time so far distant from what he'd once known. He smelled of lilies, too, though she suspected that he'd forgone his usual cologne very reluctantly.

She smiled at him, and rested one pale hand on his upper arm. "Hello, Hiei."

He nodded, and his legs were stiff to keep himself from fidgeting uncomfortably. "Yukina. I didn't know what service you meant, at first, but all things are accessible if you're prepared to trawl through enough records."

She nodded, and the smile shrank into something more befitting a mourning widow. "It's funny, isn't it? He was always so excited about new things, using the virtual controls as though they were just an extension of his arm."

"He did with most weapons," Hiei confirmed, because he hadn't been around enough since that long-buried time to comment.

She blinked, and then beamed, suddenly reminded of the brief flurry of life-and-death struggles that had brought them together in the first place. "It's been so long," she murmured quietly. "So much happened, between then and now.

"Six decades of monotony and raising half-breeds," Hiei said spitefully. He stepped back, away from her hand, and crossed his arms. "I could never have done it."

"Kazuma and I chose our path," Yukina said beatifically, and stepped closer, bridging the gap with no effort. "It was a beautiful service."

There was a brooding silence, and then Hiei bit out, "I saw."

She put her hand out again, but didn't touch him. "I'm glad. He would have liked that."

Hiei breathed loudly through his teeth and his chest bowed out far enough for his arm to come in contact with her. Her fingers moved along the soft black material of his suit. He said, "Of all things, when I first met him, I would never have pegged Kuwabara as dying of old age."

"I'm sure he would never have thought you would come to his funeral," she said reflexively, and then the sorrow pulled her heart down and the smile disappeared again. "Hiei. How have you been?"

"Better than you have," he snorted.

"I was surprised that you stayed in the human world, after Yusuke was gone and Koenma forced you to make a permanent choice between them."

He glowered at her table, made of sturdy, real wood. "There was nothing for me in the Makai." He pushed past those thoughts and gestured to the kitchen that had old technology and her out-of-fashion dress. "I'm apparently more suited to adapting than you."

"There's nothing wrong with staying the same," she said softly, to herself and to him. "I've been quite happy, for a long while."

"Wonderful," Hiei muttered to himself, almost bitterly.

"Thank you for coming. Kurama's here, too."

He looked down. "I don't care. He's old, I imagine. And soft."

"His body is human," Yukina agreed. "The demon spirit is slowing the affects of time, but it won't keep it back forever." She breathed in, sharply, to keep from sighing. "He wears it well, though. Very dignified."

"I won't see it. I have no interest in an aging fox."

Her hand moved up to his shoulder. "He's not like us," she reminded him. "None of them are. It's no one's fault."

He turned his cheek to her and glared at the wall.

She guessed, "But that doesn't stop you trying to blame someone, does it."

"I'm going," he said sharply.

"Alright," she said easily, and stepped closer to him, and hugged him. "Stay in touch."

He made a quiet sound of agreement, but promised nothing. They both knew that he wouldn't.

And then she let go and, with another rustle, he was gone.


	2. 2107

2107

(Fifty-one years later.)

* * *

The hydraulic sound of the door opening and closing on its own filled the small, clean apartment. A few seconds passed as a quick round of ultraviolet light rid him of dangerous microbiotic organisms. The soft soles of his moccasin-style shoes made hushed beats on the thick, smooth carpeting.

He entered the cramped, streamlined, bare bedroom, and stopped.

She was sitting on his bed, ankles crossed and tucked far back, one hand in her lap and the other fussing with her white pajama-like bodysuit. It fit her with a naïve, self-conscious unfamiliarity. She looked up, and smiled, but her brown eyes were somber.

Hiei said, "What are you doing here?"

More than fifty years since they had last met, he still looked about twenty-five, still wore his hair straight up. Now, he didn't have old-fashioned colored contacts to hide his red irises; cosmetic surgery made them just as plausible as any other color.

Yukina didn't look away. "I looked you up. Have you heard about Kurama?"

"No," he said obviously. "Who would I have heard from?"

"Of course." She wrung her hands for a moment, and then stood up – they were still the same height. After an uncertain hesitation, she said, "Hiei… Kurama's dying."

There was a startled silence, but then the surprised tension in Hiei's frame drained away. "How?"

"How else?" she asked, shaking her head. "Three major pandemics in a decade – the fox can't fight off disease anymore."

Hiei stared at her, deadpan. And then, feigning a vague memory on the issue, he said, "You married him, after Kuwabara."

"Yes. I sent you a message, at the time, but you didn't respond."

"How long has it been since then." There was no especial interest or inflection in his deep voice.

"Forty-three years," she answered without pause. And then she bit her lip. "But we won't see the forty-fourth."

Hiei nodded, and stepped back, needing to increase the distance. "Why have you come to tell me?"

She blinked. "Because I thought you would want to speak with him."

"I won't," he said flatly. "I won't see him on his deathbed."

"But…you were so close-"

"That was a century ago. More than. One hundred and twelve years."

Her hands made fists against her thighs, drawing the comfortable material tight. Color was starting to rise in her cheeks. But her voice was still quiet, and steady. "And that erases everything before? You were friends, Hiei."

"We aren't friends anymore."

Her back stiffened, as though he had struck her. And when she spoke again, it was breathless and forced. "And me? Is that how you see me?"

He was silent, looking away, the tension in his shoulders masked by the loose one-piece bodysuit.

She said, loudly and strongly, "How do you think I came into your house, Hiei?" She raised her hand, implying that her fingerprint was a password to all recognition systems and personal records. "In your file, I'm listed as _family_. Even after all these years. That has to be worth _something_."

Very quietly, he admitted, "It is."

"Than why won't you see Kurama?" she demanded, but more gently.

"You don't understand," he said dismissively. His arms crossed over his chest. "I always expected to watch him die – gored by some demon, in the middle of battle. I was ready for that. But not like this. Not broken and feeble and helpless."

She took several calming breaths, and then asked, "You think I don't understand? More than a century, as both friend and spouse. I can't do this again."

He still wouldn't look at her.

She set her jaw. "I can't, but I will. Because I owe him that."

She moved around him in the close space – and there was a time when she might have apologized for passing so close, since she knew how he valued space – but now she was an adult, and why hadn't he stayed to see that transformation?

She stopped, when she was almost into the cleanroom. "Oh, and a woman was here when I first came. She left her comm band for you. And she was wearing last night's dress."

Hiei said, "Fine."

"Hiei," Yukina said, and looked at him with warm, hurt eyes. "Isn't there anyone more long-term than that? Has there ever been?"

"What's the point?" he asked spitefully. "None of them can last very long. Because _we will never age_. They can't last any longer than a few years, at most."

"That's enough," she said hopefully. "Sometimes, that's enough."

"Sometimes it's not."

"Find someone you can trust, and it can last longer," she said simply.

And then she was in the other room, and purplish light showed around the cracks of the door. Hiei was incautious when it came to germs that he knew he was immune to.

She was immune to them, too.

But Kurama wasn't.

And now they were going to be alone with each other.

He sat in the darkening room for a long time, and then packed a few things in a small collapsible light-weight box and steeled himself to talk to Kurama for the last time.


	3. 2154

2154

(Forty-seven years later.)

* * *

The message was videolinked across space to Mars, but there was hardly any lagtime. The equipment was the best money could buy; Hiei had learned the art of the investment market, over the years.

She was pretty, and she was young, and she was crying on a viewscreen that magnified her to larger than life.

"Hiei," she sighed, because she wasn't going to sob to him. She wasn't hurt deeply enough for that. "I need to see you. This won't happen with so many things in between."

The sound was so sensitive that it picked up the cracking, solid sound of her tears hitting whatever floor she was standing on. He'd forgotten that they did that.

How long had it been since he'd seen her cry?

So he agreed to book the next transport.

* * *

He was standing in her kitchen a week later. It was on the same plot of land as it had always been, but now it had been completely remodeled with flat, shallow covers that would fold out and do creatively scientific things to the molecules of anything she wanted to cook.

There wasn't any sound of children falling asleep, here. Hadn't been for a century.

She was cleaning, making big swipes with a wet cloth, so utterly unnecessary and out-dated that she'd probably been forced to use water and part of an old outfit because real products weren't commercially sold.

She was wearing a spider's web of orange and purple, which clashed so violently that it could only have been on purpose, designed to fit the current fashion. Hiei was wearing gray, like a man of twice the age his outward appearance suggested.

He watched her polishing the front of the micro-scale appliances for a long time before asking, "What happened?"

Her words were short, and curt, and oddly rhythmic, falling in time with each circle she rubbed. "Things fell through with Cellion."

He spent another few minutes waiting for the rest of the explanation, and then asked for it himself. "Who was he?"

"The latest," scrub, "in a long line," scrub, "of 'long-term' men," scrub, "who last no more," scrub, "than _ten years_," scrub, "and then leave."

He bit his tongue and didn't say 'I told you so', and then felt nostalgia for a time when that phrase was common, and then buried the wish that they had the kind of relationship that would allow that. "You don't have anyone?"

She gave up on cleaning what was engineered to be spotless and threw the rag in the sink. "I have friends. But I can't tell _them_ about it. I limit myself to a few years, and then I have to give them up."

Hiei nodded. That was about his limit at all, since he had the common sense not to tell some prospective woman that he was an ageless demon.

Yukina waved a hand at the wall next to her, and announced the name of a lemon-tasting protein soda. It materialized on the counter next to her, and she gave him a testing, cursory glance before deciding he wouldn't want any. "I miss them. Kuwabara and Kurama. I had something real – something very, very true. And that was a whole fourth of my life ago."

"You haven't gotten it back," he guessed.

She shook her head. "I didn't even notice anything was wrong, this time. I can weather the usual fights, about credits or job security. But this last was personal." She paused, and swirled the syrupy liquid in its cup introspectively.

"Something about your age," he hazarded. He wasn't in the practice of propping up conversations. Wasn't in the practice of having them at all.

She smiled, but it was tired and bitter. "It started out being that I needed to falsify my records again. Right now, I'm listed as my own great-granddaughter. The real one died in the Plagues."

Hiei nodded, again. He'd rigged the same thing, with complicated lines of inheritance between identities.

"But that would put me at about sixty, so I just – I casually mentioned it, and Cellion just lit off." A hand drifted to cover her heart.

Another relic of the past; the emotional home was recognized as a certain bundle of nerves in the brain, and generally humans touched the metal interface link behind their ears when they were having a personal moment.

"He called me a demon."

Hiei didn't say that she was one. Actually, it annoyed him, too; with the social stigma attached to Hell, this was a great insult. And he imagined that Yukina's soft voice didn't do justice to the hateful tone this human must have given it.

"How are you holding up?" she asked quietly.

"Fine," he answered.

"It must be hard for you. I have someone to lean on when I go stir crazy."

He snorted. "Not anymore. He's left."

She shook her head and smiled. "I knew he would, eventually. They all do. Hiei, I meant _you_."

"What?"

"You steady me." She put a hand on his elbow, to return the favor. "There's another eddy in time, somewhere. It's very reassuring."

He let the touch rest there, and broke eye contact. His eyes drifted down to her neck. "You haven't injured yourself."

"No. I'm not the most daring, adventurous person. I read a lot, though. Politics, the like."

He nodded, again, vaguely. He started leaning his torso away from her hand.

She tightened her grip and moved with him. "Hiei, I'm concerned for you. Who steadies you?"

He stopped leaning away. He focused on the rag in the sink, not on her energy, radiating out from her in a corona of well-meaning worry.

The timbre of her voice became shallow, and she whispered urgently, "It's been a century and a half, Hiei. You have to have a source of strength, or you'll break."

His lip curled in a sneer, and he didn't stop himself from snarling at her. "I don't break. Worse things than calmly going from day to day have happened to me. Save your 'concern' for your next abortive husband."

She let his arm go, jerking back as if burned. The color was high in her cheeks.

He stood glaring at her, and then swung around towards the door.

"We don't have to be alone," Yukina offered.

Hiei closed his eyes and did _not_ imagine life the way she offered it, did _not_ rally up all of his determination to walk out of this room with even one shred of dignity.

But walk he did.

And she could only stare at his back and wonder when he had started having those loud, slapping footfalls when he walked.


	4. 2197

2197

(Fifty-four years later.)

* * *

Hiei woke up, muscles taut, sword hilt heavy and solid and real in his hands. Someone – the Enemy – was in the room with him, threatening and looming and going-going-going to kill him.

He held still as long as he could, daring the other presence to move first, and when he ran out of patience (it wasn't fear that pinned him down) he slashed at it.

The sword pass through nothing and he tried to take stock of the situation, decide if he should call Kurama and Kuwabara and Yusuke back here because obviously there was another enemy –

And then it came flooding back, the two hundred years of monotony and Kurama laying shriveled on the bed and the bioengineered lilies at Kuwabara's funeral and the way she looked at him and said that he couldn't go on alone for ever…

* * *

There was a message waiting for her when she came home. That was unusual enough; hardly anyone _left messages_ anymore, instead just logging with the Ethernet that they had tried to contact her and waiting for a return attempt.

But someone had recorded and sent her a five second videolink message, as though five seconds were enough to communicate anything.

She set down her ultrathin carrier bag and touched a control built into her purple, velvety pants, where her fingers fell against her thigh comfortably.

The viewscreen – it covered one whole wall of her bedroom – faded into view, and she missed the first second as she was raising her head.

The message played out the full five seconds, and ended.

She played it again.

Hiei was on the screen, as though he was standing in the room with her. Holo-imaging made the two-dimensional picture layered, gave it depth. She nearly tried to reach out to touch him.

The next time she played it, she took in details. His knuckles were worn and bloody, his skin was pale, his clothes were torn in places and stained in others.

The next time, she saw other things, about the room he was in. Everything was broken and smashed, with chips and pieces fetching up against the walls as detritus like it was a junkyard. There was blood on the far wall, and spiral cracks around a point of impact in the white enhanced-plastic shell over the wires underneath. The right wall had a hole in it, because he'd apparently gone for that one first.

And, for the entire five seconds, Hiei stood at the edge of the second dimension and tried to speak. But he was breathing too hard, and at about the halfway point he rubbed at his temple as though in huge pain. And then he just put his arm forward, reaching for her, and clicked the button to turn off his own viewscreen.

That was the entire message.

Yukina traced the origin and was on the next departing transport.

* * *

Hiei hadn't expected her to come so quickly. He wasn't an idiot, he knew enough that she would come when she saw the message he had drafted in his head and then given up on at the last minute.

He just hadn't expected to come through his front door to see her looking out the layered, reinforced glass that looked out over Martian dirt and more sand-blasted colonial domiciles. Her hand was pressed against the window, and her eyes seemed more focused on her fingers.

Hiei abruptly remembered that, even after what had happened so long before, he hadn't bothered to take her off the family register of his 'descendants' and identities.

She said, "What's wrong?"

He ignored the question and worked around her in the tight quarters. His pen-sized computer, which folded out and created projected the image of the screen inside a square area was set down near the electrical charger. It kept a constant field of energy, and spontaneously charged products in reach.

Yukina turned away from the orange-gray window, and watched him with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. "What made you break?"

"I didn't," he said curtly.

"You did." She came closer and set one hand on his cheek – in this society, when was the last time anyone had simply touched him for no other reason? "Hiei. You've been bending and bending, and now you've broken. I can tell."

Hiei closed his eyes, and opened then, and leaned into her hand. "I had a dream."

She huffed, maybe in laughter, and hugged his shoulders. She pressed their cheeks together and didn't look at his face as she dug deeper. "What was it about?"

He breathed out, focused on the window, pretended that she wasn't there. "An Enemy. A battle. They were all down the corridor, I could call them back if the sword broke or the Enemy wouldn't fall. And _then_."

"And then you remembered," she finished for him. "That they're all dead."

He flexed into her, and chose to believe that it wasn't a flinch. "Yes."

He felt her skin rub up and down, and when she moved back, his cheek was wet and he knew very well that he hadn't sunk so low.

She wiped her eyes, and little jewels tinkled prettily on the ground. And then she smiled brightly at him, and shrugged. "What do we do now?"

He turned to the side. "What we've always been doing."

Her voice was quiet, and sure, and just as deadly serious as Hiei had ever been in his long life. "We can't anymore. You know that."

"I know it as well as you do," Hiei admitted, and wandered into his bedroom. He heard her in the doorway – needed to stop thinking of it as a doorway, actual doors inside homes had been phased out as unnecessary material in the weathered little colony – and didn't hesitate before throwing clothes and other random, useless possessions in a bag.

He asked, "You packed clothes, didn't you?"

"Yes," she said, freely, taking this in stride. "Not all of them. Not nearly. But enough to tide for a few weeks."

"Fine. That's enough." He stepped back from the wall panel, now emptied. "Put them away, then. You'll stay here until I can move my finances around."

She came in, nearly crowding him out of the small, damaged room. As she worked, she asked, "What are you planning?"

"A ship. A transport. We'll be transient, we'll be away from prying humans."

She laughed, and it unknotted the tightness between his shoulders. "You're joking. What do you know about running a transport ship?"

He glared, daring her. "I read extensively."

"There's a wide gap between reading and practical application," she laughed, 'accidentally' bumping him with her elbow.

He said archly, "I know _practically_ everything about them."

She giggled again. And then she dropped her arms to her side and said thoughtfully, "I'll sell my home on Earth."

He blinked at her. "What? No. You don't need to do that."

"I'll make another home, Hiei," she said softly to herself. "This ship. It will be home."

"Yukina," he said sternly. "You don't need to do that. You raised children in that house."

"I did," she said dumbly. And then she beamed at him, as though it was the grandest joke she'd ever heard. "I did! Oh. Whatever was I thinking?" She grabbed his hand, and tugged on it until he stood still and looked at her. "Hiei, all my children died." She was still smiling. "And my grandchildren. And my great-grandchildren. I stopped trying to find them after that, stopped explaining myself long before."

Hiei left the room to retrieve the portable screen, and paused at the door. Very seriously, he said, "I will buy it from you, if you're intent on selling it. But if you lost the house forever, you would regret it for a very, very long time."

She smiled at him, and threatened wetness. "Alright. You can have it. What happens to it won't be my business."

Hiei nodded, and went to arrange their future.

Neither of them said that forever was a long time to live with regrets.


	5. 2242

2242

(Forty-five years later.)

* * *

Hiei knocked on the door of Yukina's quarters, and waited while she put away whatever secret project she had spent the last month hiding from him, and moved his hand in a minimalistic wave when she opened the door.

She wore a simple, solid blue outfit, and her hair was kept in a braid. She filled the cramped crew room with a familiar kind of warmth, just as she had on the two other transport vessels they had jointly owned over the years.

Hiei moved his head aft, toward the holo-projector chamber that had finally gone commercial enough to be reasonably priced. "Take a walk with me."

She nodded with mock duty and purpose, and followed behind as he strode down the tight hallway that ran the full length of the ship.

It hadn't been hard to adjust to this hierachial system of captain and mate, surprisingly. Yukina followed Hiei's instructions with complete trust, and kept the other, temporary crewmembers in line with kind words and expectant pauses.

And Hiei maybe understood a fraction of what Yukina meant about breaking.

They took walks inside the program Hiei had written to be like Genkai's old stomping grounds, talking about people they had known and, in Yukina's case, the minutiae of quirks and habits of the husbands she had had.

They talked about the past, and the future – full-blood Japanese were rare, now, which made their appearance striking, which made them susceptible to suspicion and discovery – and the present.

They weren't safe. They weren't especially happy or unhappy. But there was a kind of contentment that came with knowing each other so long and working so well and having a connection strong as the concrete no respectable contractor used anymore.

Yukina stood on top of a mountain and looked out over Old Tokyo. She cross her arms and smiled. "I miss my old home, sometimes."

Hiei had been waiting for that go-ahead for a long time. With a few quick transactions on the terminal suddenly present in the fabric of the scenery, he gave Yukina back the ownership of the house she had lived in for two hundred years.

He came back to stand with her, and the terminal wrote itself out of the program.

They stayed for a while, and then Hiei said, "I told you so."

She laughed, and knocked her shoulder against his. "I'm making you something. Us, really. It was going to be a surprise, but now I guess I just have to tell you."

She squinted, and found the place where her house was. She could spot it by second nature. "In about…a week, I'll be done with the program, and we'll be able to see them again."

Hiei stared at her solemnly. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

There were diseases, syndromes of people going into holo-imaging programs and not coming back out willingly.

She smiled. "We have each other to restrain us. And it's not the real them; just how I remember them. And you can change it, program in how they fought. None of the behavior will be a surprise, but it will be… something."

He gazed out at the city, and just nodded. It would be pleasant.

And they faced forever together.


End file.
